Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is a presentation language that uses a fixed set of tags to describe the content of a document (usually a web page). Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet format for HTML documents that has been endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium. CSS style sheets can be used to apply layout styles to web pages. In currently available web page design software, a user interface may provide the designer with both a code view to edit HTML (or other presentation language) and CSS code and a design view to edit the actual web page by interacting with a rendered view especially for design time. Thus, a user, at any one time, can choose between editing the same web page through code or through a graphical interface.
In the design view, most elements on the page render in their full size in the flow of the page. Most elements begin where another element ends, such that the wider they are or the taller they are, the more they push some of the other elements down or over. There are also absolutely positioned elements that are similar to a layer on top of the page. Some of these elements may be partially or fully obscured, so there is no way to really see them in their entireties or to edit them in the design view.
For example, an object may be an end-user license agreement that is quite long, such that its contents take up more than the visual space allotted to the average web page object. As a result, a web page designer may put the agreement in a box with scroll bars so that a viewer sees portions of the agreement at a time by scrolling through the agreement. During design time, however, the designer may want to be able to edit the contents of the agreement but may find it inconvenient or impossible to access some or all of the contents in the box-and-scroll-bar view. The designer may then desire to change the design view so that the entire agreement is visible and accessible for editing.
One solution to this problem has been to avoid the design view for editing obscured objects. However, for users who prefer to use a design view rather than working with HTML code, such a solution may be unacceptable because it is tedious and requires extensive knowledge of computer code. Another solution is for the web page design software to always show an unobscured version of the object in the design view. This solution may also be unacceptable because such large objects may destroy the layout of the page in the design view. In other words, the user can see the whole element itself, but the rest of the page may be obscured, rearranged, etc.
Some designers have adapted by going to the code view and removing some settings, changing some settings, commenting-out some settings, and the like to make an otherwise obscured object appear in its entirety in the design view. The user then edits the object in the design view, and when he or she is done, goes back to the code view and places the object back into an obscured view to restore the layout of the page. This approach, however, may require extensive knowledge of code (HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and/or the like) and the ability to remember exactly which changes were made so that they can be changed back.